Microsoft has made available for download the first Beta of the Visual Studio 2008 Software Development Kit. Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta comes on the heels of the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and is designed to integrate with the service pack on top of all Visual Studio 2008 SKUs with the exception of the Express Editions, which are not supported. The Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta delivers an array of resources from documentation to tools and even samples. In the end, the purpose of the SDK is to extend Visual Studio, and Build 1.1 Beta is, of course, focused on Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta, enabling developers to streamline the development of solutions tailored to VS 2008 SP1 Beta, from the design process to building, testing and deploying extensions.

"The updates we're providing with the SDK since our RTM release include significant reduction in size for Visual Studio Shell redistributable packages. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables are now approximately 150 megabytes smaller. The redistributables no longer carry the full .NET Framework 3.5 payload. However, they contain a bootstrapper that automatically downloads the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime if it is not installed on the target computer," revealed Quan To, Program Manager Visual Studio Extensibility.

The first Beta for Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 comes with shell documentation updated to reflect the evolution of the development platform to SP1. Additionally, the Beta also features a new XML Tree Editor sample, courtesy of the SQL Server group. The new SDK will enable developers to take Visual Studio 2008 one step further via not only custom tools environments enhancing the Shell, but also through the integration of a variety of features inside the development solution from languages to editors and tools.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta also adds "support for progress feedback in a chained installation. The Visual Studio Shell Isolated and Visual Studio Shell Integrated redistributables can now pass installation progress back to the chaining process. Visual Studio Shell development now supports normal user. Developing and deploying a Visual Studio Shell application no longer requires the developer to be an administrator on a Windows XP computer or to have elevated privileges on a Windows Vista computer," Quan To explained.

Visual Studio 2008 Software Development Kit 1.1 (SDK 1.1) Beta is available for download here.